


Buried

by PaperKatla



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Buried Alive, Canon-Typical Violence, Claustrophobia, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-28 00:12:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6305875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperKatla/pseuds/PaperKatla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An eight foot long, two-point-five foot wide, six foot deep hole can hold approximately 120 cubic feet of earth in it. With each cubic foot weighing 70-100 pounds depending on the kind of soil, the amount of moisture it held, and how densely it was packed, Cisco didn’t even want to think about exactly how much weight was bearing down on top of the flimsy pine wood lid of his make-shift tomb.</p><p>---</p><p>When Cisco is kidnapped by the newest of Central City's baddies, his newly discovered powers aren't quite enough to get him out of trouble--especially when that trouble is being buried six feet underground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buried

An eight foot long, two-point-five foot wide, six foot deep hole can hold approximately 120 cubic feet of earth in it. With each cubic foot weighing 70-100 pounds depending on the kind of soil, the amount of moisture it held, and how densely it was packed, Cisco didn’t even want to think about exactly how much weight was bearing down on top of the flimsy pine wood lid of his make-shift tomb.

“Fuck,” he wheezed.

It was getting harder to catch his breath, and to stay calm. The air around him was hot and stank of sweat. His bruised arm and head throbbed in time with the frantic beating of his heart. There was no light to see anything by, nothing to tell him how long he’d been trapped there, forcing himself to take careful, even breaths. The button on his digital watch—the one that made the numbers glow green and bright—had broken last week, and he hadn’t managed to fix it, but he kept pressing the button anyway, hoping. The watch face remained dark.

He was trying not to panic. He was pretty sure he was failing. He couldn’t get a full breath of air, he was going to suffocate down here, with his stupid, useless powers, waiting for the Flash to save him.

\---

The day had started simply enough. With Detective Joe West, a CCPD van, and the Flash. He and Joe were waiting in the van, splitting Big Belly Burger’s Seven-for-Seven meal, killing time until Barry showed up like he was supposed to.

“You know,” said Joe. “I knew it was wishful thinking to believe that Nimbus taking out the Darbynians was gonna solve my problems.” He sank deep into the cracked pleather seat of the van, and thoughtlessly fiddled with the wrapper of his double bacon burger.

Cisco clutched The Boot like a security blanket and jiggled his leg nervously. His own burger and double-dipped onion rings sat abandoned on the seat next to him. Never let it be said that Francisco Ramon would turn down a burger, but he felt anxious and uncertain. He hadn’t vibed in weeks and he had no idea if The Boot will even work on their new big bad of the week. “When have our lives ever been that easy?” he griped.

“Amen,” Joe grunted in response.

The Darbynian crime family had competition. The little gaps and fissures the family had left in Central City’s underworld had largely been filled by people who had worked for them. They’d eagerly climbed to the top once Nimbus had murdered the entire Darbynian family and their immediate associates. Some of the people who assumed power in the wake of the Darybians deaths were the Wężowys, a Polish gang who saw the empty seats that the Darbynian’s left and licked their lips, eager for a taste of the power. Normally, criminal networks weren’t exactly in the Flash’s assumed jurisdiction, but the Wężowys had been clever, and had hired their goons from cream of the city’s metahuman criminal crop.

The metahuman that Barry was trying to lure towards Cisco and his now department-famous Boot had been tentatively named Gak—solid when you punched him, but could drown you if he managed to get hold of you. Caitlin had coughed up goo for days after their first encounter with Gak and the Wężowy goons.

Cisco had tried using his new vibe powers on his own homemade goo, but all he’d managed to do was shatter all glass partitions in a 100 foot radius. Tomasz the janitor had given him dirty looks for days after that.

“Cisco!” Joe snapped, reaching back to smack Cisco’s arm before throwing himself out of the van.

On the street, Gak swung his huge, gooey fists towards the Flash. He was an unusually large metahuman—heck, he was probably just an unusually large human—and he towered over Barry’s slight form. He looked like William “The Fridge” Perry, if The Fridge has also been a metahuman who oozed like a fist full of warm silly putty. Cisco winced as Barry took a right hook across the face. Flesh-colored goo dripped of The Flash’s mask and Cisco could see how hard Barry was breathing, chest heaving as he dodged blow after blow. He might have been fast, but even The Flash couldn’t keep running forever.

“What are you waiting for?” Joe shouted.

“They’re not in range!”

The next punch had Barry hitting the ground hard enough that Cisco could hear Barry gasp for breath when he hit the ground. He coughed and spit blood and stringy goo onto the ground, teetering on shaking legs as he tried to stand again. Joe stumbled forward, fumbling for his gun, obviously wrestling with the parts of him that wanted to run to his son, and the parts of him that wanted to stick to the plan. “Fire, Cisco!” The recoil on The Boot was still huge, and the butt of the massive gun slammed against Cisco’s shoulder as he pulled the trigger. The electrified clasp shot towards the two metahumans, skittering across the cement, it slid to a stop next to a manhole still ten feet short of its goal.

Cisco threw The Boot aside before he was truly aware of what he was doing. “Fuck it,” he said, and threw himself to the ground. The flats of his palms hit the hot asphalt of the street hard enough to set them stinging. Vibrations rumbled out from his fingertips, rattling the ground, splitting the street in two until it opened up like a canyon, swallowing trash cans, half a car, and causing water mains to burst like geysers. Potholes became sinkholes, lampposts toppled, power lines snapped free from their moorings and flailed and whipped wildly across the empty street. For a brief moment, Cisco’s thoughts became a panicked loop of “Oh shit, I fucked up”—that is until one loose wire snaps at Gak’s chest, sending him reeling backwards, toppling into a deep fissure in the street.

As Cisco strode towards the metahuman, he swore he could hear Beyoncé playing somewhere in the distance, and puts a small swagger into his step as he confronts Gak like the badass he is. “That’s what happens when you mess with Vibe, bitch.”

Barry barked out of a slightly hysterical sounding laugh from his place on the ground, and Cisco preened.

Gak, on the other hand, seemed unimpressed. “Color me unimpressed. I’m supposed be scared? I’ve seen more frightening chihuahuas.” 

“Hey, this chihuahua just kicked your ass, pal.”

“Is that so?”

The pain at the back of his neck was sharp and sudden. Cisco fumbled, hitting his knees hard. Broken glass from a nearby car dug into his knees as he plucked a small dart from near his spine. It’s short, and silver, with yellow fletching, and Cisco only had a moment to ponder what it was doing in his neck before his vision tunneled, greying at the edges as he stared down at the offending object cupped in his palm. “Oh fuck,” he said, and fell forward.

\---

He’s wasn’t sure how the Wężowys only nabbed him, or why. If Cisco had his way, he would say it was because he was clearly the coolest metahuman of them all, but even he had to admit that the Mardons had far more finesse than he ever would. Either way, he found himself coming to completely alone a few hours after the fight with Gak in a basement. The room was small, and from his place on the cold, cement floor, he estimated it to be about twelve feet long by twelve feet wide, with about six and a half feet of space from floor to ceiling. There were metal pipes along the ceiling, and loose wiring curling over his head. A boiler in the corner was cold and silent, but a hum in the walls told him that someone’s had the electricity on—or, at the very least, had jerry-rigged a generator of some kind. On top of all that, he quickly realized he was hand cuffed to the curved leg of a porcelain bathtub—the last in a row of tubs, some of which have canvas covers with straps and space for someone’s head to rest still connected to them.

Cisco felt his stomach lurch as he realized they’ve brought him to the abandoned Keystone Mental Asylum. Dante and his friends had harassed him into exploring the building a few times as kids. Cisco could remember more than one time his brother had gleefully told him horror stories of the medical experiments done there, or, worse, had locked him in the abandoned patients’ rooms, only coming back from him when it Cisco had been crying for hours to be let out. Something told him that the Wężowys weren’t going to be nearly as nice to him as Dante had been.

His head felt like it was full of Gak’s ooze—which, gross—and he struggled to keep himself focused. The dim room seemed to shimmer and twist and oh, God, what was in that dart?

The thought of trying to blast his way out with his powers crossed his mind, but he wasn’t sure if blasting the handcuffs would break his wrist, and anywhere else in the room was filled with water pipes and electric wires—not a nice mix if something were to go wrong. Which it probably would. If he tore up the basement like he’d torn up the street, he would definitely, 100% die.

A door slammed outside in the hall and Cisco jumped, hissing as the metal of the handcuff bit into his wrist. The door to his “cell” swung open with a cartoonishly long creak, and a tall, pale man stepped into the room. In his hand, he held a new phone with a Bugs Bunny case, with the flashlight app on to illuminate the dim basement cell. The combination of flashlight and Bugs Bunny somehow made his mass of muscle and scar seem a bit silly and unthreatening as he stood in the open doorway. Casually, he squatted down, squinting at Cisco in the dim light. “You have quite a talent, Mr. Ramon,” he said in truly deplorable Spanish.

Which, yeah, no, how very dare he try to speak Spanish to him! “Yeah, dude, do me a favor and speak English,” Cisco snarked. “Your accent physically pains me.”

The muscly Wężowy shrugged, and opened his arms wide in an amicable gesture. “Of course, Mr. Ramon, of course.” A second goon bumped into the door as he shuffled inside the dark room, and, suddenly, yellow sunlight was pouring into the room through the open doorway. Shadows of trees and the glitter of broken glass slipped across the cement floor of his cell. The length of the shadows and the color of the sun made Cisco think of the sunsets in his own crappy apartment, when the sharp colors slipped through the blinds and warmed the soft, fuzzy rug Caitlin had bought him for his last birthday. “I have a deal for you, Mr. Ramon,” said the scarred Wężowy, pocketing his Bugs phone.

“Oh, here we go…”

“It’s a simple enough proposition: join us and live. You’ll live a good life, become a rich, powerful man.”

Cisco snorted. “Yeah, no thanks, meathead.”

The Wężowy sighed, and shook his head sadly. He gave Cisco a look like a regretful adult, about to punish a stubborn child—which, hello, he’s twenty-three! “I was so hoping you would make it easy on yourself, Mr. Ramon.”

Sitting up a bit straighter against the creepy tub, Cisco mustered up every ounce of courage he had and spat, “Try anything and I will shatter your entire nervous system without breaking a sweat.” The words came out weak and raspy and nervous.

The Wężowy smirked. “Ooh, so scary,” he mocked. He groaned as he stood up, dusting off his hands on his jeans as he paced the room thoughtfully. The look he sent the other, lingering goon is nothing short of gleeful. “I suppose there’s always Plan B as well.”

\---

They knocked him out for the ride, and when he is finally aware of his surroundings again, it was dark and the Wężowys had him kneeling with his back to a deep, dark hole. The scarred-up head Wężowy made sure to film a video on his stupid Bugs Bunny phone, warning the Flash not to follow any of the Wężowys as they leave town, or they’d “never see your sonic pal again”. If Cisco hadn’t been both concussed and drugged up to the gills, he might have rolled his eyes. Somewhere in his mind, he knew that he was behaving exactly how they wanted—quiet, compliant. He knew he should fight harder, maybe bite someone, try to throw a few sonic blasts, but he was just _so tired_.

He found himself listing to the right, leaning against one of his captor’s arms as the big Wężowy sent the video with a cheery _ping!_ The Wężowy sneered at him, lip curling up like a dog’s as he shoved his nose into Cisco’s face. “The Flash can’t be in two places at once,” he said. “Let’s see what he really values, shall we?”

The punch to his sternum sent him sprawling backwards, gasping for breath. His flailing arms slammed against the hard sides of the pine box they’d dropped into the hole they’ve dug. His foggy brain finally catches up with what’s happening—oh God, they’re burying him alive!

“Wait! Please!” he shouted.

They didn’t. Instead, they dropped the lid on top of the box, and nailed it closed.

He should have fixed the button on his watch. In a space as small as a homemade coffin, he probably only had approximately three hours worth of air. Without his watch, though, there was no way of knowing how long he’d been trapped. Twenty minutes? An hour? Two? How much longer would he have to sit and wait, wait to be rescued again? Even with superpowers, he was useless, unable to protect himself—the plucky sidekick.

It was so quiet. The sound of his own breathing seemed insanely loud, and was starting to drive him crazy even as he tried to focus on it, tried to keep it shallow and even. There’s the sound of creaking wood from above him and he feels something soft slide to fill the space around his ankles. Dirt. Earth. Part of the 120 cubic feet of it piled on top of him, leaking in through the crack in the wood of the lid near his feet.

Oh, God, he’s going to die!

“Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic,” he told himself, panicking. His breath came in short, shallow gasps, and he became quickly aware how much he was panicking.

And how tired he felt. Should he be this tired? Was it the concussion making him sleepy, or the lack of oxygen that would slowly, slowly turn off his brain as he slipped away into nothingness and—no! no! He was not going to die and he was not going to panic and he was not going to fall asleep.

Barry would save him. The Flash would save him. And, after, they could work on training his powers so that he could stop getting kidnapped by criminals.

The wood above him creaked and groaned again, before cracking, caving in near his chest and sending soft, wet earth pouring into the coffin, filling the cavity between his chest and the lid. Now, he was panicking! His mind flashed back to the blue-tinted other timeline, to Eobard Thawne and a hand in his chest, tearing his heart to pieces. He started to scream, beating with his fists at the cracked lid of the coffin, spitting out dirt, gasping for breath. “Help! Help me! Please!”

His vision began to tunnel. This was it. This was how Francisco Ramon died. Watch out, Elizabeth, he was comin’!

“Fuck! Please, please!” he screamed. His knuckles were starting to bleed from the splinters, and he dropped his hands to his sides, movement weak and sluggish. His chest stuttered as he gasped for more air, movement dislodging more dirt that tumbled into his mouth, his nose.

He passed out with a sigh. He didn’t dream. You don’t dream when you’re dead.

\---

There was a soft beeping sound as he woke up. His chest ached, his head pounded, and, as his mind cleared, he had his first real thought: there was something in his throat! He could feel it, something cold and plastic against his lips, against his tongue, scraping along the back of his throat. The soft beeping behind him became more frantic, as he raised his uncooperative hands towards his face, his mind screaming to get it out, get it out, get it out!

“Cisco! Cisco!” It was Joe, his voice loud, and close to his ear. He had taken hold of Cisco’s hands in his own, squeezing his fingers closed and pulling them away from his face. Cisco fought back at first, because clearly Joe didn’t understand that there was something in his throat, but the detective only held tighter, and leaned closer. “Cisco. Cisco listen to me, you have to calm down. You’ve been out of it for a while, pal.”

Cisco managed to peel his eyes open. They felt crusty and gross and he wondered how long “a while” actually was. The last thing he remembered was passing out from lack of oxygen in a broken pine coffin. When had the Flash come? How long had he been down there, unable to use sonic powers for fear of collapsing the weak pine box on top of him? He looked up at Joe, who looked tired, dark rings under his eyes, the shadow of stubble across his cheeks, and figured it was probably more than a day. His eyes flicked to the only other figure in the room—Caitlin, who had her head pillowed on the bed near his feet, practically falling out of the chair she’d settled in. She was still asleep.

It took another moment to realize he was in a hospital—a real hospital, not just the make-shift med-bay they’d set up in the Cortex. The room was filled with flowers and balloons that proclaimed “Get well soon!” in cheery, yellow font. Someone had even gone so far as to tuck a small teddy bear in a Flash get-up under his arm. Which, yeah, all right, it was cute.

Slowly, Joe released his hold on Cisco’s hand, and gently tucked them under the blankets. “You had us all worried there for a hot second,” he said. He reached up and started to pet the oily hair back away from Cisco’s face, the motion steady and smooth. It was a nice gesture—a paternal gesture—and Cisco couldn’t help but melt as if he was made up of ooey-gooey gak and not slightly-pudgy mechanical engineer. “You’re weren’t even breathing when Barry got to you. I’ve seen a lot of death in my line of work, but don’t you go scaring us like that again.”

Cisco imagined that “you died” should feel more important, but he was still tired. A quick look to his right and he spotted a sneaky nurse, pushing a syringe into a small port of his IV line. She smiled when she saw him, then flicked up her gaze towards Joe. “This should put him out for a couple more hours.”

Joe chuckled, still petting Cisco’s hair softly, as his eyelids drooped closed on cue. “Get some rest, Cisco.”

\---

The removal of the ventilator tube the next day makes his throat feel like someone attacked the inside of it with a cheese grater. His face swelled like a chipmunk, and it felt like he couldn’t get enough water, when all anyone would give him was ice chips. Basically, it was torture, and he milked it for everything it was worth. And while Caitlin and Iris seemed unimpressed with his dramatic display and general repeating of the phrase, “Yo, be nice to me, I died!”, Barry seemed incredibly concerned and fussy.

Caitlin and Barry had explained to him how the Wężowys didn’t give up the location of where they’d buried until they were miles out of town. By the time Barry at his “grave site”—an abandoned lot behind an equally abandoned grocery store in West Keystone—and dug him out, Cisco had been dead for an estimated five to ten minutes. It was another ten minutes of Barry and Caitlin performing CPR and periodic electrical shocks before he even had a pulse. Everyone knew it was a miracle. The chances of resuscitation after twenty minutes were slim, even if no one was saying it. And the chances of cognitive impairment seemed to be a looming threat.

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “I know what the date is, who the President is, it’s fine.”

The doctors and nurses all looked at him funny, their gaze flicking between him and Joe, as if they wanted to ask how a seemingly innocent mechanical engineer got mixed up with a gang and it’s metahumans, but Joe rebuffed all their questions with “Police business” until they stopped asking.

When Barry wasn’t fussing over him, he would disappear for long hours, searching for the Wężowys and their metahuman goons, but always came back with the same hang-dog expression, and a dozen apologies to everyone. “We can worry about the Wężowys another day,” Joe assured everyone. “The Flash can handle it. Hell, Vibe can clearly handle it,” Joe said, batting his arm playfully. “Girls, you should have seen our boy Cisco here, the city might be miffed, but I can’t say I’ve seen a better way to stop a meta than having the earth swallow them like some Old Testament God.”

“Let’s not make that comparison,” Cisco replied, and everyone kindly turned the topic to something else until Cisco remembered how to breathe again. It took him a while to come back around, but when he did, Caitlin was holding his hand, and everyone else had left the room. She climbed up onto the tiny hospital bed next to him, and pulled him against her side, stroking his hair in that same soothing way that Joe had done. Cisco pushed his face into her side. “I’m going to cry now.”

“Okay,” she replied. “You do that.”

So, he did. Heaving great, gasping sobs into her blouse because he was a metahuman, and he was strong, but they still took him. And he had to live with that horrible, claustrophobic memory, and the memory of other deaths, and the pain he felt before he’d passed out and he was just _so tired_. He wasn’t a god.

He fell asleep against her, and when he woke up, Joe and Barry were leading his entire family into the tiny hospital room—his parents, his brother, even cousins he hadn’t seen since his confirmation. “Just kill me, Barry,” he said, as his mother almost immediately started to cry. “Just shred my heart, put me out of my misery!”

Barry smiled tightly at the confused Ramon family. “Um, it’s the oxygen deprivation talking,” he fumbled, which did nothing to stop his mother from crying. Her wails took up a new pitch that could probably break glass—and was his mother a metahuman? It felt like it once she threw herself at him, crying and babbling frantically about “her poor baby” in Spanglish. Cisco looked over his mother’s shoulder once she was done frantically kissing him, and mouthed ‘God’ll get you for this’ to Barry.

\---

The hospital released him on a Friday, and the STAR Labs crew immediately absconded with him, throwing lame excuses like “Police business!” to the confused Ramon family. They threw a little party at the Wests’ house in his honor. He was still a bit wobbly on his legs, and still occasionally found himself gasping for breath, feeling crowded or claustrophobic, but Caitlin made sure that everyone gave him space and was nice to him. They weren’t nice enough to allow him to drink, though, because he was “still recovering”, but Joe’s root beer floats made up for it somewhat.

A few of the officers from the CCPD came and brought him a cake with green slime frosting that looked like they it pulled right out of a 1999 Nickelodeon Magazine and a bag full of nothing but cheap, dollar store water pistols and containers of silly putty—which, har har har. Yes, he got kidnapped by a crime gang whose number one goon was basically human ooblek. He get’s it. Joke’s over.

If he was honest with himself, he felt terrified. The Flash had not found the Wężowys yet, and Gak was still at large. They could still find him; he might have been appealing to them now that they’d seen his powers. But, maybe not—they did bury him alive. The Flash was still looking, though, which meant that he had more than enough time to prepare for his next match with Gak and the Wężowys. Vibe might not have worked out all of his powers, but he would. The next time the Flash and Vibe tangled with the Wężowys, he’d be ready.

**Author's Note:**

> There needs to be more Cisco fic, so I decided to try and fix that.


End file.
